Think the CIA and conservation research have nothing in common? Think again. In this episode of "Gorongosa Field Notes," ecologist Joshua Daskin and field assistant Flavio Artur Moniz use surveillance photographs collected by the CIA during the Cold War to uncover how a decline in elephant numbers is dramatically altering the landscape in Gorongosa National Park.

Video courtesy of E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

Doing ecology in new and exciting places sometimes means that perfect historical data aren’t readily available for comparison with the present, and more creative efforts might be in order. As part of my PhD dissertation with the Pringle Lab at Princeton University, I’ve been using recently declassified American government satellite imagery recorded high over Mozambique in 1977 to study how war-driven mammal declines in Gorongosa National Park might have affected tree cover in the park’s savannas.

Good news, folks: The world won’t end on Sunday, when an asteroid nicknamed “Pitbull” will zip past Earth. But asteroid 2014 RC will provide some virtual sky-watching drama for fans of celestial flybys. (Related: “Asteroids and Comets.”) Discovered independently by two different observatory teams on August 31, the 60-foot-wide (20 meters) space rock will come closest to Earth at…

Join radio host Boyd Matson every week for adventure, conservation and green science. This week his guests reflect on the dangers of climbing Mount Everest after the recent tragedy, row a boat across the oceans and bike across continents to circumnavigate the globe, discover what it is like to be a kid in Mongolia, learn what happened This Weekend In History, detect land mines in Cambodia, travel in style with your dog companion, discover new ways which drug trafficking is cutting down the rainforest, gave through space and time with the world’s most powerful satellite array, and understand why Sherpas climb deadly peaks on Wild Chronicles.

Coming soon—take the ultimate selfie from space! Two high-definition cameras are on their way now to the International Space Station. There, they will aim to revolutionize how we view our planet and ourselves. A Canadian-based company named UrtheCast will offer the world’s first near-live HD video and imagery of Earth from space, using the…

William Lenoir, an astronaut who flew aboard the first space shuttle mission to deploy commercial satellites, died August 26 from head injuries sustained during a bicycle accident. —Image courtesy NASA Born March 14, 1939, in Miami, Florida, Lenoir earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ultimately graduating with a Ph.D. in electrical…

By James Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media One of the coolest-sounding missions launched by NASA comes to an explosive end tomorrow morning. The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (or LCROSS) will smash into the moon at about 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST), followed by another impact four minutes later. (Read the National Geographic…

Of the more than 300 planets circling other stars we’ve found so far, only a handful have ever had their pictures taken directly. Astronomers strongly suspect the vast majority of these so-called exoplanets exist based solely on indirect evidence, such as their gravitational effects on stars. So the trick, then, is figuring out anything else…

It seems fitting that in a year being celebrated worldwide as the 400th anniversary of telescopic astronomy, NASA and ESA have chosen one of Galileo’s first loves, Jupiter, as their next top planet. Cut-away images show the insides of Io, Ganymede, … In January of 1610 the famed Italian Galileo Galilei pointed a homemade ‘scope…

It’s our closest neighbor in the solar system and the only one we’ve set human feet on so far. But there’s still plenty of mystery surrounding our orbital partner, the moon. —Image courtesy NASA Perhaps one of the biggest questions is why we have a lone natural satellite, and a pretty big one at that.…

Malaspina Glacier in the Gulf of Alaska (created from a Landsat satellite image and NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) —Image courtesy NASA I was stunned to hear that ice loss from glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska adds up to 84 gigatons a year, or about five times the average yearly flow of the Colorado…

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Pristine Seas: Seychelles LaunchesThe National Geographic Pristine Seas team is out exploring the waters of the Seychelles, an archipelago just north of Madagascar, to study and film the incredible abundance and diversity of marine life there. (Photo by Manu San Félix)

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